Shotgun Wedding is an action romantic comedy directed by Pitch Perfect’s Jason Moore and written by Mark Hammer, whose claim to fame is the little-seen Miles Teller and Lio Tipton film Two Night Stand. The film stars Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel, who plays Darcy and Tom, a couple about to get married on a beautiful tropical island in the middle of the Philippines. Tom is a former baseball player who can no longer play in the big leagues.
Tom is a bit insecure, which makes the screenplay kind of fun when compared to the ultra-confident Darcy. He has to compete with the men in his fiancé’s life. One of them is her multimillionaire father, Robert (Cheech Marin), who is worth somewhere nearly 60 million dollars. Robert is involved with his much younger acupuncturist, Harriet (Barry’s D’Arcy Carden). Robert has little affection for his daughter’s future husband. In fact, he prefers his daughter to come to her senses and marry Sean (Lenny Kravitz), her ex. He is a highly successful entrepreneur and philanthropist who crashes their wedding by helicopter without an invite.
As Tom excessively worries about why Darcy refuses to embrace the wedding experience, their destination wedding is overrun by two types of people. One is their overbearing and over-opinionated families. That includes Tom’s mother, played by a priceless Jennifer Coolidge, who hysterically has little to no filter. The other is a remarkably well-informed and plucky band of pirates who take the wedding party hostage. To keep them at bay, the pirates make the entire group stand in the pool while they search for Tom and Darcy.
It turns out, while this is happening, the happy couple begins to bicker and argue and start to have cold feet. The leader of the group of armed killers tells Robert he wants 45 million dollars transferred into an account. The father of the bride refuses until he knows his daughter is safe. The “happy” couple evades a few bad guys and girls until they are caught. They manage to escape several times.
One, Darcy sets two pirates’ heads on fire when lighting a cigarette when handcuffed to the back of a jeep. Tom and Darcy accidentally kill another while trying to escape the jungle. In team life fashion, the bad guy is knocked down. The result is they hit the back of their head against a rock. Darcy recovers a grenade without the pin. Then when they zipline across the beach, it slips out of her hands, blowing up some more. Tom even uses Darcy as bait in the kitchen before killing a pirate in self-defense. How? By tossing one through a glass window.
When they manage to get back to the resort office, they find the owners hiding under a trap door underneath the office desk. That’s where Darcy finds out Tom knew about this hotel being attacked by pirates the year prior. What are the odds of it happening again, was Tom thinking. Tom then bravely leaves Darcy with the owners, leading the pirates away from her, and he is taken back to the hostages, where he figures out the plan. One of the pirates had a wedding invitation Tom found in their pocket. And only one person was invited to the wedding that did not RSVP.
Sean.
Sean then knows the jig is up and punches Tom in the face. Robert is crushed, knowing Sean did this because he turned him down for a loan earlier in the year. Sean then takes Harriet hostage with the lead pirate and heads off in a helicopter to locate Darcy on the other side of the island. Meanwhile, with Tom’s help, Darcy shows up and overpowers the rest of the hostages to free the wedding party by pretending to throw an impromptu wedding under the silky smooth lyrics of Edwin McCain. They free themselves when Tom’s mom picks up a machine gun and sprays the beach with bullets, and Tom blows up a bad guy by batting a grenade in their direction.
While this is happening, it is revealed Sean and Harriet are having an affair, and she is the driving force behind this attempted heist. They circle back, and Sean attacks the couple to try and then leave the island to get help. With Sean on the back of the boat fighting Tom and Darcy driving, Harriet is in a trailing helicopter shooting bullets at them. A parasailing parachute opens, which takes Sean up hundreds of feet in the air and he hangs on for his dear life. With bullets still raining down, the couple takes their wedding knife and cuts the rope. This sends Sean and the chute into the helicopter carrying Harriet. This causes the aircraft to crash and blow up.
Shotgun Wedding Ending Explained
After all of this, will Darcy and Tom get married? Yes, and when they get back to the beach, they both repropose to each other. The final scenes show Darcy and Tom marrying on the beach in front of their loved ones. The after-credits scene has the happy couple and the entire post-wedding reception rocking it out.
What did you think of the ending of the 2022 film Shotgun Wedding? Comment below.
